Memrise Review

Saturday, December 14th

2024 Portuguese Lesson Reviews

Memrise

• Price: Starts free, with plans from $8.74/month
• Can choose to learn Portuguese from Brazil or Portugal (separate courses)
• Can learn from a starting language other than English
• Can move around freely among levels of difficulty
• Desktop and app access
• Offers AI chatbot for practice
• User-friendly and engaging interface
• Teaches useful phrases for real-life situations
• Tons of video clips for authentic learning, from short (staged) videos to real-world content like BBC in Portuguese
• Missed words added to "Difficult Words" for review

Crafted by a group of friends who bonded over their shared passion for neuroscience at Oxford, Memrise employs memory techniques, neuroscience principles, and innovative language acquisition methods to make learning not just effective, but enjoyable too. It's also one of the only options you'll have for learning either Portuguese as spoken in either Brazil or Portugal (or both, but they're presented separately on the platform).

Get started for free

It's easy to sign up for a free account with Memrise, to get a feel for how you'll learn Portuguese here. For reference, we set ours to Brazilian Portuguese and did our primary learning through the app (though it's also available via desktop), so that will be the basis of the rest of our review. There are three primary modes of learning here: Words, Videos, and Conversations. You can skip around freely, not just among those three ways of practicing Portuguese, but also among different themes and difficulty levels. You'll see those under the Scenarios tab, clearly labeled as "Basics”, "Education”, "Relationships”, and other topics you may want to prioritize.

Uses lots of native speaker video clips and accents

So, let's say you pick something intro-level, like Useful Expressions. You'll be shown words and phrases in Portuguese, sometimes as a video clip with a native speaker in a real-world setting (like in a grocery store or at the beach) and sometimes just as an audio clip. You'll be shown both the figurative and literal translations (when applicable) in whatever language you've decided to use as your "home base”: of course, we chose English (US), but feel free to set yours to any language you'd like the Portuguese to be mapped onto for translation.

Straightforward learning and practice of vocabulary

Memrise doesn't want you to waste time on what you already know, so each new word and phrase has the option to say, "I already know this”. It won't be added to the exercises that follow, so you can focus your precious practice time on what's new to you. The ones that get kept for practice will then have you match the audio file with 4 possible matches to choose from in English, and then you'll type out what you hear, so that you're not just making lucky guesses as you learn. Memrise keeps track of how well you know each piece of vocabulary, and then prompts you to keep them current in the Review tab under Scenarios. There's Classic practice to "strengthen fading memories” at your own pace, and Speed Review if you like a little time pressure to see if you can recall how to say things a little more quickly. This vocab practice at Memrise isn't really anything exceptional. You'll find tools like it on most of the Portuguese lessons in our review.

Authentic videos are amazing

However, we're huge fans of the Videos and Conversations here. Let's start with Videos, down at the bottom of the app. At the top of the list are the ones that Memrise says you haven't seen, and you can see at a glance how many words in the video it thinks you already know. You can watch the clip and see for yourself how many target words you actually do know, or click to learn the words in the video that Memrise thinks might be new to you. The level of this content is really impressive, from short 15-second clips of native speakers having a simple exchange (complete with captions), all the way up to 8-minute segments in Portuguese on the BBC News YouTube channel that discuss why Brazilians living in the US aren't always considered "Latino” or "Hispanic”. In short, there's no lack of ways for you to be exposed to authentic Portuguese and to work on your receptive language ability.

No longer offers community-created content

That's a good thing to point out to anyone who may have used Memrise in the past, because those videos are part of how the platform is trying to make up for a well-loved feature that was removed in early 2024: community-created content. That included hundreds if not thousands of additional ways for practicing Portuguese, from flashcards for common Bird App vocab to movie clubs for learning the language through blockbusters and lesser-known films. You'll still have a lot to choose from, but the way it's presented and accessed has changed since the time you may have been on this platform in the past.

AI-powered conversations are a huge perk

The other big addition to Memrise is the AI chatbot under the Conversations tab, and we're all about it. Powered by GPT, MemBot has Chats and Missions (that honestly feel like the same thing) to help you try and have a text conversation in a real-world scenario. Maybe you're going to order your favorite beverage at a restaurant, or you're meeting the future in-laws for the first time and want to make a good impression. You'll have the chance to try out your skills and see how much you know. But don't worry: you can get hints along the way if it feels a little out of reach. MemBot will translate what you've typed, show you corrections on any mistakes you made, and read out what the other "person” in the conversation is saying to you. NGL, our AI-powered chats left us feeling like rockstars in Portuguese, where our 1,000-day streak on the Bird App had us questioning what we'd been doing with our life for nearly three years.

Speaking practice isn't automatically included

However, those conversations highlight one big modality that's missing in the new version of Memrise: actual speaking practice. In our first three hours on the app, we thought we just hadn't reached the level or the exercises where we'd see how our accent compared to native speaker prompts. Reaching out to a friend that had been using Memrise for years across multiple languages, we asked where those might be found, and unfortunately, it looks like that's not something you'll get with the Portuguese lessons here. Sure, you can read along with anything you're working on, imitate the native speakers in the videos, use the microphone to speak your part of the conversation in the AI chat instead of typing (which is probably fairly comparable to the practice on other apps), and so on, but it doesn't necessarily use tech to see how close you come to being accurate. With all of the drawbacks inherent in most voice-matching features on rival Portuguese lessons, like telling you it's a great match when it's not (or vice-versa), this isn't the biggest loss in the world. But, it did have us feeling a little lopsided in our learning until we started making more use of the microphone during the AI chats vs. typing them out.

Lots for free, but worth the cost of subscription

So, what does it all cost? Even if you're on a tight budget, Memrise offers plenty of value even for free. It's convenient that they allow you to filter out paid content right from your dashboard. However, if you're interested in removing ads and accessing all the Scenarios, Videos, and Conversations, you can opt for the Pro plan, which offers various payment options:

• Monthly Plan: $22.99 per month
• Yearly Plan: $104.79 per year (originally $130.99, equivalent to $8.74 per month, a 20% discount on Pro)
• Lifetime Plan: A one-time payment of $124.99 (previously priced at $249.99, a 50% discount on Pro)

If you don't see the 50% discount available when you visit Memrise, don't worry; they frequently offer this deal. It's worth checking back, especially around holidays, if you miss out on it initially.

One of our favorite resources for Portuguese lessons

As you can tell after all that (!), we're big fans of Memrise. If you're wondering if the paid plan is worth it, we'd give an enthusiastic "sim!” and recommend that you bite the bullet on the lifetime plan if you can snag it at the 50% discount. This is one of the most entertaining ways to make genuine progress with your Portuguese, and you can always test out your fluency with AI chats and real-world video snippets. There aren't a ton of Portuguese lessons that give you access to content ranging from the most basic vocabulary of "eu gosto de” to having a chat conversation about whether or not parents in China should be communicating more with their children when they go far away for work (yes, that was one of our recent chats when we scrolled to a random topic beyond the basics!). We love Memrise and encourage you to give it a try for yourself.